The Charge

His fame is their fortune.

Opening Statement

HBO is in a tight spot. Their flagship shows, which have proven to be
enormously successful and helped make a new name for the cable channel over the
past several years, are coming to an end. Sex and the City has already
wrapped up; The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are entering into
their final seasons. Some new blood has to be brought in.

Enter the Mark Wahlberg-produced Entourage, premiering in the summer
of 2004, and now being released as Entourage: The Complete First Season
in a new two-disc DVD boxed set. Is the show another Deadwood for the
network? Or will it suffer the fate of The Mind of the Married Man and
K Street?

Facts of the Case

Movie star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, Cecil B. Demented) is on the road to the
top: His new action thriller, Head On, is about to open; Ari, his
pit-bull agent (Jeremy Piven, Chasing
Liberty, Grosse Point Blank), has just lined up his next movie,
described as "Die Hard at
Disneyworld"; he lives in an enormous house in Hollywood, dates beautiful
women, and makes piles of money. And, like any young star in Tinsel Town, he's
got a gang of buddies who accompany him wherever he goes: his older brother, a
has-been / would-be actor who goes by the name Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon, Platoon, The Doors), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara, Nailed
Right In), and Eric (Kevin Connelly, The Notebook), the best friend who's
recently moved out from New York to serve as Vincent's unofficial script reader
and manager.

The first half of Season One revolves around the promotion and publicity of
Vincent's newest film, Head On, costarring Jessica Alba (Honey, who is one of many celebrities doing
a guest appearance as herself); the second half deals with Eric's efforts to get
Vincent to star in a low-budget independent film (shooting back home in New
York) against Ari's wishes, as well as his growing interest in being taken more
seriously as Vincent's manager.

The Evidence

Here's how I've decided to make the case for Entourage, one of the
better-kept secrets on television (despite some commercial and critical
success—the first season picked up two Emmy nominations—it's still
failed to spark the kind of morning-after discussion that HBO's most popular
shows inspire). Seeing as it's a show in which plot takes a back seat—it's
driven by its five major characters (the four friends and Piven's agent
character)—I thought I might attempt to examine which of the characters
(or the respective actor's performance of that character) makes the show work.
Sounds easy, right? Yeah, okay. Here we go.

• Eric: The obvious brain of the series, Eric is the
character we experience all events through. He's the audience's vessel: the
fish-out-of-water—the Normal Guy—unfazed by the surfaces and
politics of Hollywood. Eric is there solely for his best friend—the fact
that his friend happens to be a big movie star doesn't seem to factor into the
equation, a quality that endears Eric to us even further and gives us yet
another reason to root for him. Kevin Connelly keeps Eric grounded—he's
the only one who sees the big picture amid a sea of fickle now-ness and
immediate gratification. He's our ballast; without Connelly, the show would
float away towards total inaccessibility—a self-absorbed in-joke not
unlike Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal
(or that similarly-themed—and, incidentally,
Soderbergh-produced—other HBO show, Unscripted). With him,
it becomes a kind of travelogue with Eric as our guide; an outsider's look at
the movie industry, told from the inside.

• Vincent Chase: Look, as a satire of the movie business
in Hollywood, it would have been all too easy for Entourage to take the
low road and make the character of Vincent Chase, the movie star at the show's
center, a self-absorbed and self-serious narcissist—a one-dimensional
douchebag. It's a testament to the writers, then, and to Adrian Grenier's
loopily charismatic performance, that Vincent comes off as charming and magnetic
as he does. We believe the man is a star. We understand his appeal. More
importantly, though, we respect him—not for his professionalism (he
doesn't have much) or his talent (which we don't get to see), but for his
loyalty to his friends. Vince is a Good Guy; he's someone we want to hang out
and be friends with, whether or not he's famous (the fact that he is doesn't
hurt). Grenier allows us to see the man beneath the celebrity, and it's that
kind of humanism that makes Entourage much more than just another shallow
stab at a shallow culture.

• Johnny Drama: If Kevin Connelly's Eric is the brains of
Entourage, then Kevin Dillon's funny, ballsy, and, yes, touching
portrayal of Vincent Chase's older, never-quite-made-it actor brother Johnny is
the show's undeniable heart. Not only does he provide a perfect picture of what
could have been (if Vince had never hit it big, the two brothers would be in the
same boat), but Johnny also represents the enormous fringe component of
Hollywood—the bit players, the extras, the people facing countless
rejections at the hands of countless auditions. Dillon makes Drama aggressively
and hilariously macho—by the last couple of episodes in the season, he's
able to get laughs just by opening his mouth—but there's a human side to
him that occasionally peeks its head out. Neither Dillon nor the show's creators
ever call attention to it, and that's the right choice, but it's
there—watch the hurt on his face when the Industry lets him down for the
umpteenth time, or when his friends treat the business that he knows and loves
like their own personal playground. As much fun as the Entourage gang has
with the movie industry, Johnny Drama still takes it very seriously; that he's
forever passed over in favor of his younger brother, who couldn't take it
less seriously, clearly weighs on him. Dillon never goes too heavy with
this shade of his character, though, and keeps it light and funny; like the rest
of the actors, he takes a role that could easily go broad and grounds it in
humanity. Maybe something in the role speaks to Kevin Dillon, whose real-life
older brother Matt has had a more successful career, but he's finally gotten a
role deserving of his talents; with Entourage, it's the younger Dillon
getting the last laugh.

• Turtle: The most amazing thing about Jerry Ferrara's
performance as Brooklynite goofball Turtle is that is works at all. He's the
clown in the series already top-heavy with comic relief; if Vincent Chase is the
King, then Turtle is his Jester. In a show called Entourage, he's the
clearest example of the simple-minded route the show could have taken—he's
a hanger-on, the only one in the group who's there to take full advantage of
being friends with a movie star. Turtle's not above making Vince shill for an
electronics store during a Jimmy Kimmel appearance in order to get a home
theater hookup; he talks the assistant to Vince's publicist into scoring him
some UGG boots so that he can score with a girl. And, yet, there's more to
Turtle than opportunism and leeching; he's a loyal friend and a hard worker for
Vince, often taking on tasks that no one else is interested in performing.
Ferrara, the only actor on the show of whom I was previously unaware, is a real
find. As broadly as his character is sometimes drawn, Ferrara finds subtle ways
to make him funny—a gesture or an expression to punch up the laugh on the
page. He's also got a kind of Clerks-era
Jason Mewes thing about him, in that he doesn't appear to be acting at
all—you'd swear someone just plucked him off the street and threw him into
a series. That kind of naturalism helps keep the role from being too
over-the-top silly. He avoids being the Screech and becomes a totally believable
member of the gang.

• Ari Gold: Vincent Chase's agent, Ari Gold, is exactly
what you expect from Entourage. He's a fast-talking, caffeinated
sleaze—more willing to pimp for his client than he is to participate in
his own family. As played by Jeremy Piven, though, Ari becomes something
transcendent. It goes beyond the typical "backstage Hollywood
satire"—which it (and the whole of Entourage) could have been
nothing more than—and lives and breathes on its own. The
performance—the only one of the bunch to receive an Emmy nomination last
fall—is the breakout of the show, and there's a reason: This is the role
Piven has been leading up to his entire career. He's played roles that have
contained elements of Ari—think of his manic energy in Peter Berg's
Very Bad Things or his cocksure arrogance in Judgment
Night—but Entourage finds Piven firing on all cylinders. He
barks and insults, wheels and deals; he's cruel, sharp, vulgar and hilarious. In
show packed with good reasons to watch, Piven is the best one—his Ari Gold
might just be the most likeable bastard on television.

So, which guy is it that makes the show work? The answer should be obvious:
It's no one character, but rather the sum total of each of them that adds up to
what makes Entourage such a smart, funny, and refreshing series. It's one
of the rare shows I've seen that understands the ways in which guys interact and
relate to one another (a bit like a boys' answer to Sex and the City in
that way), but avoids lapsing into misogyny or macho stereotypes—there's
an appeal for men and women alike. Plus, there are enough layers present in the
show to last it for multiple seasons; the fact that the creative forces at work
have found and developed so many of those layers in the span of a single season
speaks well for what's to come.

Entourage: The Complete First Season comes to DVD courtesy of Warner
Bros. The eight episodes are spread out over two discs (four on each, for no
good reason) and are presented in their original full frame television format.
Though the series' photography shifts from bright, sunny L.A. beaches to the
darkened clubs of the night life, the image on the DVD never favors one look
over the other—the image is surprisingly consistent and detail is sharp
throughout. The 2.0 stereo audio track packs an unexpected punch; the dialogue
is loud and clear and the ever-present thumping rap-and-club music has real
presence. It's a very technically sound set.

The extras that have been included—and they're pretty
spare—appear primarily on the second disc. Doug Ellin (Kissing a
Fool) and Larry Charles (Seinfeld), who both serve as writers and
producers on the show, speak over three episodes—one on first disc (the
Pilot) and two on the second. Their commentaries are listenable if uninspired.
There's a reasonable amount of behind-the-scenes information present, and they
can be amusing at times (especially when talking about Gary Busey's insane and
brilliant turn as himself in the episode "Busey and the Beach"), but I
would have liked to have heard some of the other voices that helped bring the
show to TV—say, Mark Wahlberg (who's an executive producer and major
inspiration for the Vincent Chase character), for one. There's also a short
behind-the-scenes piece that basically talks about how much the cast members
like one another and how they all bonded on a trip to Las Vegas.

Closing Statement

Give Entourage a chance. It's a smart, funny show and one of the few
half-hour comedy series on television that actually works. Long may it run.